Today, October 6th around 3:20 PM a strange behavior of some Feathercoin clients where noticed by the community.
Further investigation showed that an attempt of a DOS attack was causing the problem.
The attack tried to use a recently discovered vulnerability of Bitcoin code versions < 0.16.3, causing the attacked block chain to stop working correctly and mint the block chain to the attackers advantage.
The Feathercoin devepoment team released a fix against this attack on September 22nd 2018.
This fix together with Feathercoins advanced checkpointing (ACP) mechanism defended the block against the attack.
Current status is:
FTC Blockchain is operating normally
FTC Clients with version < 16.3 are stuck at block 2366280
Actions to re- activate stuck clients:
upgrade your client to the latest Version
see ttps://feathercoin.com/#wallets for latest releases for your OS
Restart the client with the -rescan comand line paramter
wait until the client is fully synced again and compare the block count with the one shown on https://explorer.feathercoin.com

Today the new Feathercoin client version 0.17.0.1 was released.
This is a patch release, changing the handling of checkpoints and includes the latest changes of the upstream Bitcoin client version 0.17.1
Please update at a convenient time.
The tx indexing has changed, so the first startup of version 0.17.0.1 may take longer than normal.
Please be patient and wait until the maintenance tasks are finished and main window shows up.
Please report any problems to the this forum (forum.feathercoin.com)

I agree completely, so much scammy shit out there these days. Coinmarketcap even listing tether now as tho it were a crypto and adding it into market totals. I have nothing against tether, it serves a function, but its not a crypto by any stretch of the imagination. I think the new plan to try and kill decentralization is by rebranding stablecoins as cryptocurrencies. Then we can all go on happily trading markers referring to USD run on a centralized database and pretend we’re doing something.
I’ve thought for years the best way to assert the value of FTC would be to go after atomic swaps in a big way. The coins that can trade decentralized with other coins are going to maintain value best. Of course im not a coder so can’t help with that at all, but i have made donations to FTCs devs in the past and plan to do so again. Probably the best way to make things happen is support the smart people behind the coin and keep them interested.

mhh, I’m using the 0.17.0/0.17.1 version of the client and my original wallet is from 2014.
I didn’t have the problems you faced and all upgrades worked well.
As far as I know you need a clean wallet to enable hd key generatation, but you can dump your private keys to the console, copy/paste the keys to a safe place, delete the wallet.dat file and start the client. It then have hd keys enabled and generate an hd key for you. As soon as that is done you can add your private keys from the console and rescan the blockchain to get your coins.

Another possible solution:
when no new blocks are seen for a given time frame, the daemons themself generate one special block at the configured lowest difficulty.
Characteristics of the block:
no coins generated
no transactions are contained
That way a new difficulty can be calculated /announced after the hash rate drops dramatically and the time to block can be limited without breaking the protocol.
For sure there are complications in this solution, that need to be addressed.
This is a high level idea only

got it, I had already just made a fresh install on a new pc and started messing with the wallet.dat file there once i had my coins moved over. (removing it, replacing it… seeing what happens etc) but its good to know i can just do it on 1 pc in the future. thanks!

while this has been a great learning experience and fun to host for the community, I am unpinning this as we now have a full Feathercore / bitcore port thanks to @Bushstar
This was a very old repo and should no longer be used.